Series

Connect With Us

On Media

Wolff: Murdoch 'grumpy' with Romney

By Dylan Byers

08/28/12 10:50 AM EDT

One of the more enjoyable sideshows of the 2012 presidential race has been Rupert Murdoch's Twitter stream, where the conservative media mogul drops admonition on Mitt Romney like the ghost of a distant, disappointed father figure.

Michael Wolff, who wrote the book on Rupert Murdoch (much to Murdoch's chagrin), gets behind the tweets to explain why Murdoch hates Mitt:

[Murdoch's] tweets have questioned Mitt Romney’s prospects and prowess, urging him, for instance, to drop “old friends from team” and hire “some real pros,” and they have possibly helped to goad Paul Ryan onto the ticket.

The tweeting may be new, but the opinions aren’t. During the 2008 campaign, when I spent several hours each week interviewing Murdoch for the biography I was writing about him and was privy to his constant campaign replays, Romney never earned more from the often non-verbal Murdoch than a snort, guffaw, or grimace. Murdoch, whose core political values are more visceral than ideological, marveled at the contrast between the stolid father—George Romney, running a come-from-behind automobile company—and what he reckoned to be the hopelessly superficial son in the private-equity business. (Murdoch’s oldest daughter, Prudence, was once, briefly and unhappily, married to a private-equity type whom he didn’t like at all.)

Romney, he continues to tell people who find their way into his political conversations (or monologues) this year, can’t be trusted. Romney is “unprincipled”—one of Murdoch’s bad words—by which he usually means too camera-ready, too media-attuned, and too market-focused. And the larger point: He is just plain grumpy about the uninspired Republican nominee, with the implicit threat that, if unappeased, he is capable of throwing a wrench into the works.

The full article, published in the lastest eiditon of The New Republic, here.